The Student Editor: What a Yellow ‘FINISHED’ Banner Taught One Novelist About Ooligan Press

On the Start to Finish page for Eliot Treichel’s novel Close Is Fine, there is a picture of the cover with a yellow banner reading FINISHED across it. The progress bar had reached 100%. The last entry had been posted. And Treichel remembers his reaction: “Oh, but wait. It’s not over. It’s just starting.”

That banner is the artifact. Not a contract, not a marked galley, not a permissions invoice—though those are the usual objects this column reaches for. A progress bar on a student-run press’s website, capped with a word that means the opposite of what the author felt. It is a small piece of web design, and it exposes a category error at the heart of how we talk about publishing: the press marks the end of production, while the author experiences launch as the beginning of a different, less structured, less supported kind of labor.

Treichel’s account of working with Portland State University’s Ooligan Press appeared in a 2013 interview on the press’s own site, conducted by Miranda Rabuck. It is one author’s testimony, not a survey, and the details are specific to a book published more than a decade ago. But the structural features it describes—student editors who graduate, a public progress bar, a handoff that arrives before the work is done—are worth reading closely, because they clarify what a teaching press actually offers a writer and what it asks in return.

What the Start to Finish pages were for

Ooligan’s Start to Finish pages, as the interview’s introduction describes them, “document a book’s progress from its acquisition to its launch” and give authors “a behind-the-scenes look at the development of their books.” The project managers blogged as the book moved through departments. The metaphor the interviewer uses is a baby growing into a published book—authors checking in on the development of something they made.

That framing is generous, and it is also a little misleading, in the way that all publishing metaphors are. A baby does not have a project manager who graduates. A book does.

Expectations, and the uncertainty of the author’s role

Rabuck asked Treichel what he expected his role to be during the publishing process, and how the experience differed. His answer is unusually plain: “I knew that there’d be editing work, and that maybe I’d get to provide some input into other areas of design, and that finally there’d be some collaboration in terms of marketing and sales. And that’s really how it played out.”

Then the sentence that makes the interview useful: “Occasionally, I felt a little unsure of how big or vocal my role should be.”

This is the ordinary condition of a debut author at a small press. The press has a workflow; the author has a book and no map of where the decisions get made. Treichel names the feeling without dramatizing it. He also names the pleasure and the fear in the same breath: “It’s really fun to turn your book over to someone else and see what they’ll do with it, but it’s also a little terrifying. At times, I worried that I was over-expressing the terrified part.”

For a writer considering a teaching press, that is the honest version of the trade. You get a team. You do not get a single, continuous editor who will still be there in eighteen months.

The student-editor reality: turnover is structural, not incidental

Treichel worked most closely with the book’s project managers—he names Rachel Haag, Irene Costello, Marc Lindsay, Katie Allen, and Rachel Pass—and he is explicit about the difficulty: “One of the toughest parts about the process with Ooligan is that students graduate, and that there’s some turnover between departments.”

He is careful to say the problem was not competence. “It was particularly tough when Rachel Haag and Irene graduated, not because there was any drop off in competence, or in the all-around awesomeness of the project managers, but because Rachel and Irene were my first contacts with Ooligan, and they really understood the book and championed it forward.”

Read that again. The loss is not editorial skill. The loss is institutional memory of the book—the accumulated understanding of what it is and why it matters, held by people who have now left the program. A new project manager inherits the files, the schedule, and the manuscript. What they do not inherit is the conviction that grew up around it.

This is where the student-press model differs from what a commercial house offers, and the difference is not simply a matter of prestige or budget. At a press staffed by students in a publishing program, the people advocating for your book are also people learning how to advocate for a book. They will get better at it. Then they will leave.

A practical test for the handoff

Here is a recommendation, clearly labeled as one: if you are working with a teaching press and your first project manager is about to graduate, treat the handoff as a test of whether the book’s case survives being explained to someone who has not read the manuscript. Write the memo yourself. One page: what the book is, who it is for, the two or three sentences you would want a bookseller to repeat, and the comparisons you are willing to stand behind. If the new editor reads it and can pitch the book back to you without hedging, the handoff worked. If not, you have learned something useful before launch rather than after.

This is a hypothetical procedure, not a report of what Treichel did. But it follows from what he describes: the book’s champion changes, and the author is the only continuous party.

What the editing process actually yielded

The durable return on a student-press apprenticeship, in Treichel’s account, is craft. “I learned a lot during the editing process, not only about how to work together with an editing team, but also about some of my own writing tics and miscues, and about what’s really important to me in a sentence or a story.”

That sentence is worth more than any adjective about the experience. He does not say the editing was excellent or transformative. He says he learned his own tics and miscues—the recurring habits a writer cannot see alone—and he learned what he actually values at the level of the sentence. That is the thing an author keeps after the project managers graduate and the progress bar hits 100%.

It is also the argument for why a teaching press can be a good first publisher even when it cannot offer an advance or a national marketing budget. The editorial attention is real, it is distributed across a team, and it is aimed at a manuscript that the team has chosen. What it produces, if the author is paying attention, is a writer who can revise without a team.

After the banner: contests, readings, and silence

Treichel describes the post-launch labor with the flatness of someone reporting from experience. “Much of the work I’ve seen go into Close Is Fine since the launch has been with entering it into contests.” And then: “I’ve been surprised at how hard it’s been to set up readings, or to even get bookstores to call or email me back concerning readings.”

He mentions the Midwest Booksellers Association and gets no response. He wanted to do a series of readings at people’s houses, in the manner of Stephen Elliott, and “chickened out.” He is candid that he does not know whether any of it would have given the book more traction.

This is the part of publishing that the progress bar cannot represent. Production has a schedule, departments, and a finish line. Post-launch work has none of those things. It has contests with entry fees and deadlines, bookstores with unanswered emails, and an author trying to decide how much of the remaining work is theirs to do. At a large house, a publicist absorbs some of this. At a teaching press, the author absorbs most of it, and the press’s involvement continues in ways the author may not see—Treichel says as much: “much of the work I’m not exactly sure about.”

The 101% proposal

Treichel’s own suggestion is the cleanest editorial idea in the interview: “The progress bar on each book’s Start to Finish page should go to 101% or something.”

He is joking about the number and serious about the point. The FINISHED banner, he says, has “connotations of death and termination and all that”—and you do not want your publisher telling you your book is finished right after it has been released. A bar that stops at 100% teaches authors that launch is the end. A bar that goes to 101% would teach them that launch is a threshold into work the press cannot schedule for them.

There is a second argument buried in the same passage. Treichel praises the Start to Finish format for its openness: “Not all the posts from the Start to Finish pages are about how swimmingly everything is going. The public gets to see the struggles, the hiccups, the learning moments—all of which, ultimately, provide a much more realistic picture and understanding of the publishing process.” That willingness to show the hiccups is not a failure of professionalism. It is the educational mission made visible, and it is the most useful thing a teaching press can publish about itself.

What this means for a writer weighing a student-run press

The evidence here is one author’s account of one book, published by Ooligan in 2013. It does not establish what Ooligan’s catalog, submission guidelines, or staffing look like now, and it should not be generalized into a claim about every author who has worked with a teaching press. What it does establish is a set of questions worth asking before you sign:

Who is the project manager, and when do they graduate? Ask for the timeline in months, not semesters.
What happens to the book’s files and its editorial rationale when the first team leaves? Is there a handoff document, and who writes it?
What does the press do after launch—contests, readings, outreach—and what is the author expected to do? Get the split in plain terms.
What does the press publish about its own process? A press willing to show its hiccups is a press that will tell you the truth about its capacity.

None of these questions has a reassuring answer at every press. The point is to ask them before the progress bar starts moving.

The artifact, reconsidered

The yellow FINISHED banner is a small thing—a graphic on a page that may no longer exist in the form Treichel described. But it does what the best artifacts do in this column: it makes a structural fact visible. A press’s production calendar ends. An author’s work does not. The gap between those two timelines is where debut books are won or lost, and a student-run press, with its annual turnover and its public progress bars, makes the gap unusually easy to see.

Treichel’s summary of what the experience changed in him is the sentence to keep: “I’m a much better writer having undergone this experience. And I now have new ideas about what you can do with your writing after it’s been written.” That is not a claim about the press’s marketing reach or its contest record. It is a claim about what the author learned to do with a finished book—which is the only thing a teaching press can promise, and, on this evidence, sometimes delivers.

FAQ

What is Ooligan Press?

Ooligan Press is a student-run publishing house associated with Portland State University’s publishing program. The 2013 interview discussed here describes its Start to Finish pages, which documented a book’s progress from acquisition to launch. Current submission guidelines and catalog information should be checked directly with the press, as this article does not rely on its present-day operations.

What is a Start to Finish page?

According to the 2013 Ooligan interview, Start to Finish pages documented a book’s progress from acquisition to launch and gave authors a behind-the-scenes view of development, with project managers posting updates as the manuscript moved through departments.

Do student editors stay with a book through publication?

Not always. Eliot Treichel, whose novel Close Is Fine was published by Ooligan, said that “one of the toughest parts about the process with Ooligan is that students graduate, and that there’s some turnover between departments.” He emphasized that the issue was continuity of understanding, not competence.

What did Treichel learn from the editing process?

He said he learned about his own “writing tics and miscues” and about “what’s really important to me in a sentence or a story,” in addition to learning how to work with an editing team.

What happens after a small-press book launches?

In Treichel’s account, much of the visible post-launch work was entering the book into contests, and he found it surprisingly hard to set up readings or get bookstores to respond. He proposed that the Start to Finish progress bar should go to 101% to reflect that the work continues after launch.

Source: Miranda Rabuck, “Beyond Start to Finish: Interview with Eliot Treichel,” Ooligan Press, April 22, 2013, https://ooliganpress.com/beyond-start-to-finish. All quotations in this article are from that interview.